What was intended as a one-off game to pass a couple of hours turned into a two year project that saw Nicolina recreate the artwork for 100 classic albums, from Pink Floyd and The Velvet Underground to Blur and Arctic Monkeys.

Come 2016, I have decided to only upload black and white photos to my Instagram. It’s going to be really simple in execution and I will place more emphasis on the story within the frame.

My intention is to desaturate colours from Instagram’s in-app photo editing tools and leave it at that. This way, I won’t spend time fretting over how a photo to look, but just take the damn photo. Possibly tonnes of imperfections, but I want to improve my eye for photography rather than rely on post-work.

And ideally, I’ll post one post a week in the format: My week in pictures: 2016-xx for a total of 52 weeks, highlighting my favourites.

That is all.

EDIT-2015-12-28: I am using the Obscura App, Noir filter with almost no post-production work. The app lets me adjust shutter speed and ISO settings, and my goal is to concentrate on photography rather than post production work.

EDIT-2016-01-04: I realize that the series should be called, “My Week in Photos”, not “My Week in Pictures”

And the same excuse will always be about how uninspired I am with regards to writing in here.

To give myself a little boost, I installed a Markdown plugin to let me write these posts the way I prefer, but even then it’s a small change. The real change has to come from the inside.

Excuse me this little dog-ear of a post. I’m hoping 2016 will be a year where I’ll share more about my thoughts and opinions on the things that shape my being and my perspectives on the things I care about.

So I just got turned onto HEALTH and my word, they’ve got some brutal sounds. I’m pulled into their craft because the way they perform the noise genre isn’t an anti-thesis to order, but a symbiosis between order and chaos. You can also imagine it as Pet Shop Boys vs. Nine Inch Nails.

Lately, it’s been increasingly difficult to escape or find new perspectives. I fear inertia is setting in. Today I mused to myself that it would be great to have an app that randomized other-worldly sounds and images, just pure randomness, to help take my mind off the things I’ve curated and ritualized.

Because everywhere I look, it’s the same thing. The same type of content being recycled, the algorithms predicting what I’d like, when what I really want is discovery.

That your device can predict what you want to do better than you can might seem like futuristic fantasy, but Foursquare already does this.

This is true. Swiping on cards is a great way to make a yes/no decision NOW.

Now, imagine if each card was packed with data that would advise your learning algorithm on why the card was swiped yes or no, especially when based on the user’s previous data. This future does not seem too far away.

Ironic that computers become smarter as humans distill their behaviours to simple binaries.

But in a world where classical computers are approaching their limits, it at least provides some hope that the trend can be reversed.

Jumping from 512 qubits to 1,000 qubits is a pretty big leap. And while still early in the realm of quantum computing, this is a pretty significant breakthrough for computer engineering, and perhaps one step closer toward the singularity. I wonder if I’ll see it in my lifetime.

It’s 1130pm now and I’m scrambling to get Mixtape 020 out before the stroke of midnight. Why the rush you ask? No reason apart from me wanting to stick to the deadline I’d set for myself. Writing’s a discipline, and like any discipline, targets must be set, they must be practiced, and then some slight improvements can perhaps happen. Or at least the regularity will give some illusion of predictability.

I’m not really a tastemaker, in any legit sense of the word, but I hope you like some of the tracks I’ve pulled out from Soundcloud. It kind of describes the moods I’ve been feeling such as noise and distortion, as well as the comforts that never go away no matter how hard I try, like an addiction-fueled groove or an understated beat.

Like Sons of Magdalene’s Move To Pain; it carries an exceptionally spellbinding melody that’s both melancholic and uplifting all at once. Or take for example, Arterial that follows after it; awash with an ominous tragedy. The stop-start of Demon Practice‘s fuzzysexy bassline also never seems to grow old, neither does the long-drive-on-straight-road groove featured on Crystalise

Beat-wise, the glitchy patchwork of Fort Romeau’s remix of Go Back and this mixtape’s closer, naked, both evoke a primal instinct when it comes to enjoying electronic music.

And if there’s something in between, it would be muxmool’s Teal Trim, which is one of my favourite tracks off his Just Say It All EP. That reverb laden keyboard line that plays throughout the entire song juxtaposes so well with that gravity sucking bassline. And just for good measure, I decided to throw in Tendo Beat as a ‘lil ditty of a beat, just because it’s so pleasant and platonic.

Depending on who you ask dance music either never disappeared or else just had to wait for people to wise up to it. Loose, lo-fi house music designed for home listening morphed from oxymoron to chic to fad to status quo in a blur of backlashing critical anxiety. “Outsider” has been decreed a dirty word; insiders are in again, then. Underdogs become overlords. All terrain is contested terrain. It’s hard to know what to think about what you hear – even though strangers are lining up to tell you.

There is no scene, there is no sound, there are only individuals. Music outlasts the world’s perception of it. Feel what’s real; forget the rest.